Qualcomm, Broadcom settle with Dutch IP house

LONDON – Semiconductor Ideas to the Market BV, otherwise known as ItoM, has reached a settlement with several chip companies, including Qualcomm and Broadcom, in a deal reportedly worth several million dollars.

ItoM (Eindhoven, The Netherlands), an applied research lab that was spun off from Philips in 1998 and pursued an IP generation and licensing business model, has not confirmed the size of the settlement but issued a statement stating it has dismissed patent infringement claims pending in the Eastern District of Texas. The statement referenced Qualcomm and Broadcom amongst other unnamed parties.

The law suit alleged that many companies in the mobile communications sector have infringed two of ItoM's patents covering transceiver technology.

"We are extremely gratified that we were able to resolve our dispute with the dismissed parties," said Peter Langendam, CEO of ItoM, in a statement. "ItoM has a broad array of intellectual property rights covering its many innovations in transceiver systems, and we will continue to ensure that we are fairly compensated for the use of our technology," Langendam added.

Other parties that were involved in the case reportedly include Philips, Apple, Dell, Samsung, Nokia, AT&T and Texas Instruments, according to an Intellectual Asset Management report. The same report said that ItoM is in litigation in the Dutch courts with close neighbor and fellow Philips spin-off NXP Semiconductor NV.

ItoM specializes in circuits and architectures for television, radio and communications in the mobile communications and portable multimedia markets. In particular the company creates designs that are compact and low power.

ItoM has developed an extensive patent portfolio and its business model is based on licensing its intellectual property rights, in particular with respect to its proprietary IC building blocks and designs based on them. An example of ItoM's work is a 65-nm CMOS IC receiver for FM stereo radio. The part requires no external components and a sensitivity of 3dB/microvolt.